My wife has had indigestion for twenty years. Not the inconvenient kind. The kind where a meal that went fine for everyone else leaves her curled up on the couch at nine in the evening, and I sit behind her and press my palm into her back, in the spot that seems to help, until it passes.
We have done this for the entire length of our marriage.
The family history
Her grandmother died from complications of diabetes. Her mother has been prediabetic for two decades, managing it with a discipline that has become its own kind of grief — the constant monitoring, the foods she cannot eat at the table she built for her family, the slow narrowing of what is allowed.
My wife is thirty-eight. She watches her mother and does the arithmetic.
I watched her watch her mother and decided I was not willing to accept the arithmetic.
What the research showed
In the spring of 2025, I spent several months reading metabolic science the way I used to read fintech regulation — obsessively, at odd hours, looking for the structural insight that changes how the whole problem looks.
What I found was this: the human body has an original design. We evolved over millions of years in environments where food was scarce and movement was constant. Our metabolic systems were built to stabilize glucose, repair cells, and self-regulate under conditions of intermittent stress. The modern diet — abundant, processed, sedentary — violates this design at every turn.
The consequence is not just diabetes. It is the low-grade metabolic dysfunction that presents as fatigue after meals, afternoon brain fog, persistent cravings, and the gradual accumulation of visceral fat that precedes the diagnosis by twenty years.
Ninety-six million Americans are prediabetic. Most of them do not know it. And no consumer brand has built a category around this problem.
Original Design Decoded
I started ODD in February 2025. The name stands for Original Design Decoded. It is also, intentionally, a little strange — a company that names itself after what it is trying to undo.
We launched ODD M-01 in October 2025. It is a daily supplement built around five clinically proven ingredients: Delphinol, a maqui berry extract that reduces post-meal glucose by up to thirty-three percent; Reducose, a mulberry leaf extract that slows carbohydrate conversion; Orafti GR, a chicory fiber that improves insulin sensitivity; GOFOS, a prebiotic that multiplies beneficial gut bacteria tenfold within ten days; and Lalmin C2000, a yeast-derived vitamin C.
None of these ingredients are exotic. All of them have been studied extensively. What had not been done was combining them in a format designed for daily ritual rather than therapeutic intervention — positioned not as medicine but as the daily practice of returning the body to its original design.
The real founding story
Every startup has a founder story. Mine starts with pressing my hand into my wife's back on a Tuesday night in Seoul, thinking: there has to be something better than this.
That is not the version I tell investors. It is the version that is true.
She takes ODD M-01 now. Most evenings after dinner, she does not need me to press her back.
That is the product working. That is also what it was always for.